


What's Your Name?

by Little_Plebe



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Avengers Tower, Canon Divergence, F/M, Natasha is the only smart peep around, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Thor: The Dark World, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-22 04:01:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11959290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Little_Plebe/pseuds/Little_Plebe
Summary: In a world where birthdays are more special than they already are, eleven-year-old Darcy Lewis finds she's not like other people. She's cursed, and somewhere far out of the reaches of her consciousness, there's a special hell just for her.





	What's Your Name?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Em_Jaye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Em_Jaye/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Emily! Please accept this giant ball of romangst as a birthday present from me. Sorry no candles, sprinkles and confetti. There might be cake though. Maybe.
> 
> Thanks to [hollyspacey](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Hollyspacey/pseuds/Hollyspacey) who read this over and held my hand when I was being a whiny, insecure little shit. She also helped me with words 'cause, apparently, when I overwork myself, my vocab level drops.

The clock in Jane Foster’s makeshift lab struck ten and Darcy Lewis turned an expectant gaze to her boss, who showed no signs of shutting down and going home. The astrophysicist was still very much engrossed in her work and most likely had no idea it was past six, which was ironic because Jane monitored atmospheric spikes every hour.

The generator continued grunting, a machine beeped every time it acquired new data, Erik’s snores steadily increased in volume, and all that noise—which had been background sounds until that moment—started grating on Darcy’s ears. She drummed her fingers on the desk and bounced impatiently in her seat, making their entire workspace tremble with her antics.

It caught Jane’s attention. “If you have to go pee, go pee,” she advised, barely raising her eyes from the computer screen.

Darcy scoffed. “I don’t have to pee.”

“Then why are you bouncing and fidgeting like that? It’s distracting.”

It was no surprise that Jane had forgotten Darcy’s birthday. She hardly ever remembered her own. Not that she needed to anymore. She had found her soul mate already. She had met Thor.

For Darcy, though, birthdays were still as important as they were to her when she was five.

She decided to remind Jane. “I’ll be 23 in two hours, Professor Absentminded.”

Jane’s head snapped up. “Shit.”

The sudden shift in her focus was entertaining to watch, as her expression morphed from do-not-disturb to surprise to apologetic in a matter of seconds. Now that she had Jane’s attention, Darcy started packing up her things.

“I need to go home and get ready for bed,” she said, trying not to think too much about what was going to happen but still failing to repress her excitement.

“Of course, you do.” Jane made a shooing motion with her hands.

There was silence as Darcy cleaned up her desk and stuffed her things into her bag as quickly as possible. Then, she heard Jane’s voice, low and wistful.

“You realize this could be it. Tonight could be the night you finally see him.” There was a soft smile on her face Darcy hadn’t seen since Thor left.

“Yeah,” she whispered, feeling a familiar giddiness take residence in her stomach. “Yeah.”

———

When Darcy was seven years old, she had her first shared dream. Used to green meadows, rainbows and dreams about people in her life, the sudden chill that seemed to engulf her from all sides alarmed her. It was a cold, dark place she found herself in. And there was a voice, a man’s voice, which kept calling out to her. He sounded scared, and his voice echoed repeatedly in her ears, again and again _and again_ until Darcy became so overwhelmed by her nightmare that she cried herself into consciousness.

When her parents asked her what she had seen, she could only remember the cold. And the terrible, terrible darkness that seemed to seep into her being and make her feel like she was in a void, buried in a space that didn’t exist.

She never wanted to go to that place again.

But it was not meant to be. Exactly on the same date next year, Darcy found herself in the cold place again, surrounded by the panicked cries of a man she couldn’t see. Tears welled up in her eyes and she dropped to her knees, slapping her palms to her ears and drowning the man’s cries with her own terrified screams.

Ever year, on the morning of her birthday, she woke up from the same nightmare sobbing heavily yet unable to recall anything but the intense cold. Her lack of memory and the way she described the dreams as nightmares set her parents on edge.

On her eleventh birthday, they sat her down and told her the truth about her dreams.

“What’s a soul mate?” was the first thing she asked when they were done speaking.

“Your soul mate is your other half,” her mom explained eagerly. “They were made for you and you were made for them.”

The idea, no doubt, was appealing: a person who was made for her and would love her no matter what. Darcy stared at her parents with wide shining eyes, her eleven year old self building up a magical fairytale in her head, a role reversal fairytale where she was a princess on a quest to find her prince. Goose bumps erupted on her skin at the mere thought of it.

“You see them in your dreams,” her mom continued, “make friends with them, and when the time comes, you meet them in real life and live happily ever after.”

“But I don’t see anyone in my dreams,” Darcy complained. “No boy, no girl. Not even a single _thing_.”

“Try harder next time, okay, sweetheart?” her dad suggested, smiling a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “If you don’t see your soul mate, if you don’t _look_ at their face, you’ll forget about them in the morning. It’s the way these dreams work.”

To a young Darcy, that was a very flawed way of meeting one’s soul mate. What about those people who were blind? How would they look upon the face of their soul mate? Would they be alone forever, reduced to dreaming about their prince once a year till the day they died? And what about people like her who saw only nothingness in their dreams?

“What if,” she began quietly, looking at her parents with dawning dismay. “What if I don’t have a soul mate? What if I’m meant to be alone all my life?”

“Aww, honey,” her mom cooed. “C’mere.”

Darcy went and burrowed in her mom’s chest, fighting a rising lump in her throat as both her parents bundled her in a group hug. Their failure to oppose her, to tell her she was being silly, confirmed her fears. There was a very real possibility that she didn’t have a soul mate, that she would not get her happily ever after, and that she was cursed with these nightmares forever.

So, from that day forth, Darcy started steeling herself for the inevitable. It was easier to cope now that she knew why her birthdays always started with tears. By the time her twelfth birthday came along, she had a list that she read every day and night until it was burned in her subconscious.  
 _  
\- Ignore the cold  
\- Find my soul mate  
\- Tell him all the nice things about me  
\- Remember to look at his face  
\- Ask his name  
\- Do not cry!  
_  
It was easier said than done. Just the sound of the man’s voice reduced her to tears. His cries were that of a drowning man calling out for help. Alone and scared, Darcy felt despair and hopelessness creep into her being, and she found herself swaying to her knees again, hands on her ears, lips parted in a silent scream for help.

But then her parents’ words filtered in through her fear and she remembered her list. _Find my soul mate. Find my soul mate…_

Swiping a hand across her tear-streaked face, she peered into the darkness and shouted in a wobbly voice, “Where are you?”

The cries gradually subsided and there was a moment of silence before a voice rasped, “Who are you?”

“Darcy,” she replied without hesitation. “Darcy Lewis. Who are you?”

“Steve.”

She didn’t dare hope but, God, she was so relieved to have finally made some progress that a small watery smile crept up on her chubby face. She began to crawl blindly in the darkness, keeping her eyes peeled for any sign of light.

“It’s nice to meet you, Steve.”

There was no reply, so she repeated her earlier question. “Where are you?”

“Can you help me?” Steve grunted as if in pain. He sounded closer but she still couldn’t see him.

“Sure, but… I don’t know where you are,” yelled Darcy, crawling faster in the direction of his voice. “I can’t see you.”

“I’m stuck.” His words were edged with desperation. “Can you get me out of here?”

Darcy spun this way and that, her movements growing frantic. How could she help him if she didn’t know where he was? She couldn’t even make out her own hands in this place.

“I… I am…” Frustration began to set in.

“Please,” he begged, panic clear in his voice. “Please, I’m stuck. I can’t breathe properly… and I’m cold.”

There was a pause and Darcy stopped in her tracks, staring uncertainly into the vast nothingness. “Steve?”

“I’m always cold,” he whispered gloomily, and Darcy’s eyes burned with fresh tears. “I think,” Steve continued in the same dismal voice. “I think I’m dead.”

_“No!”_

“Darcy! Darcy, what’s wrong?”

She was sitting upright in bed, her cheeks wet and fingers clenched tightly into her favorite Wonder Woman blanket. When her vision cleared, she saw her parents’ anxious faces before her. Her breath stuttered and her heart thudded painfully in her chest. It felt like she had run a marathon.

“What did you see?” her mom asked gently.

“I…” Darcy racked her brain but, for the life of her, she couldn’t remember what the dream was about. “I don’t know.”

Her parents stayed with her until all traces of sadness faded and only confusion remained. Then, they all went downstairs to celebrate another year gone with cake and confetti.

In this manner, the years went by. Every birthday, like clockwork, Darcy dreamed about Steve. She never saw him and he never saw her but he began to expect her. Her presence calmed him and he never asked for her help again, but he still believed that he was dead.

Darcy, however, held on to her optimism. If he was really pushing daisies like he claimed, she wouldn’t be sharing dreams with him, would she?

“How old are you?” she asked him when she turned fourteen.

“27.”

“Wow, you’re _old_ ,” she blurted, her smile wavering. “I don’t even know any college boys let alone old folk. Except my grandparents. And Mrs. Kimberly next door. She’s thirty-five and an absolute bat!”

There was a huff of laughter from Steve. “I’m not that old.”

His words did nothing to ease her concerns. Her soul mate was thirteen years her elder. She was a teenager and he was practically ancient. She resolved to ask her parents if it was even allowed, provided she remembered in the morning.

“How come I know you in my dreams but forget when I wake up?” she wondered when she was sixteen.

“What do you mean?” Steve asked. He had a deep rumbling voice which Darcy was only now beginning to appreciate.

“I mean, last year you told me you were in the army.” That’s all he had really told her about it, seeming reluctant to talk about his brief stint in the army. Darcy concluded it must have been a traumatizing experience for him. “I remember it clearly right now. But in the morning, I’ll forget. And I won’t remember it until the next time I see you. Well, not _see you_ see you…”

“Maybe you’re not supposed to see me at all.” Darcy knew what was coming before he even said it. “Maybe this is all a trick of your mind.”

“It’s not,” Darcy said firmly. No matter how hard he tried, he wouldn’t be able to convince her otherwise. Her imagination wasn’t so incredible that it would conjure up a person like Steve. “You’re my soul mate. You’re definitely real.”

“I can’t _be_ your soul mate. I’m dead.”

Despite Steve’s crippling pessimism, Darcy enjoyed spending time with him. The darkness didn’t feel so stifling anymore and the cold grew bearable as she and Steve became friends. She could share anything with him without the fear of being judged. Most boys just wanted to get fresh with her, but Steve was different. He listened, and when he could, shared good advice that would surely help if she could only remember his words once she woke up.

“Steve. Steve. Steve. Steve. Steve…”

“Why are you chanting my name? Did you join a monastery in the past year?”

“I’m gonna wake up soon and I wanna remember your name if nothing else,” Darcy explained earnestly. “Now don’t interrupt. Steve. Steve. Steve…”

She woke up with his name on her lips and the ghost of his laugh in her ears. By the time she was sitting up and scrambling for her diary, his name was lost to her again.

“But there is _someone_ there. You recall a presence?” her mom asked for the hundredth time in her life.

Darcy closed her eyes and a tear squeezed out, splashing into her bowl of cereal. “Yes,” she croaked, tired of confirming the same thing over and over again. “There’s a guy.”

“Then there’s no reason to cry,” her mom smiled. “You should be happy. Your soul mate exists.”

Her cheerfulness annoyed Darcy. She couldn’t think of a time she was so discouraged, so frustrated with someone or something in her life. As much as she looked forward to her birthday dreams, she hated the prospect of plowing through another long year without knowing who her soul mate was. She cursed her memory and, more often than not, blamed herself for her inability to recall details in the morning.

“Maybe we’re not doing this right,” she mused out loud the next time she found herself sitting in the dark.

“I don’t understand.”

“Maybe we’re supposed to do something different,” Darcy said keenly. “Maybe this is a kind of test and we’re supposed to pass it to become visible to each other. _UnstrungJim1988_ on soulmatemyths.com believes we have to tell each other everything about ourselves… starting with our deepest darkest secrets.”

She patiently waited for Steve’s response, but when all she heard was silence, Darcy asked hesitantly, “What do you think? Do you want to share something with me, something you haven’t told me before?”

He didn’t reply immediately and Darcy’s mind spun with possibilities. He knew everything about her but there was still a lot she didn’t know about him. Was he hiding something? Would he tell her?

A beat passed before she got her answer. “I’ve shared enough.”

 

Getting accepted into Culver proved to be a nice change of scenery and a much needed distraction. Darcy was fed up of her parents, fed up of the pity in their eyes and the way they still behaved like she was their little princess in constant need of love and protection.

She didn’t need protection, and if it wasn’t for all this bullshit about soul mates, she wouldn’t need the love of a man too. She would have been happy being single and independent.

“The entire system is flawed!” she screamed on her twentieth birthday when her dorm mates tried to throw her a party. “Who came up with this soul mate dream sharing mindfuck anyway? I wanna know their name. Tell me. TELL ME!”

Needless to say, following her tantrum, she didn’t retain a lot of friends in her three years at Culver.

When Jane came along, she brought with her the magic words Darcy had always wanted to hear.

“I haven’t seen him too,” she confessed with a careless shrug. “But I know there’s a man. And he has a hammer.”

“Maybe he’s a carpenter,” Darcy suggested, her heart swelling with hope at Jane’s words. She wasn’t alone. Thank God, she wasn’t alone. She had read about people like her. But she had never met one.

“It’s a big hammer and it’s just lying there on a rainbow. That’s all I remember.”

It wasn’t until Thor crashed into their lives in a literal tornado that Darcy realized why Jane couldn’t see him in her dreams. He was not from this world! He was a demigod who had lived light years apart from Jane all his life. No wonder Jane had dreamed about the rainbow bridge. It was a way to Thor. _Her subconscious had shown her a way to Thor!_

It was unbelievably romantic.

Later, Darcy would ask him if there was a realm somewhere in the universe where everything was cold and dark, and Thor would smile and say, “The universe is too big for us to comprehend, little one. Don’t lose hope.”

But even before the God of Thunder advised her to have faith, Darcy knew her soul mate wasn’t from this realm. He couldn’t be. So, maybe she would finally see him when he landed on earth, or… or if they both tried _really_ hard from their ends, they would be able to see and touch each other in their dreams like other people could.

The hope that flared within her at the realization was blinding, and she held on to it with all she had.

By the time her twenty-third birthday rolled around, Darcy was ready for another stroll in soul mate land.

———

_“You realize this could be it. Tonight could be the night you finally see him.”_

_“Yeah… yeah.”_

Darcy slammed the door to her room and dropped her bag, taking a minute to close her eyes and calm her racing heartbeats. She moved on autopilot, her steps quick and efficient, as she took a hot shower, put on a clean nice smelling pair of pajamas, blow-dried her hair until it curled the way she wanted it, switched off her phone so she wouldn’t be disturbed, and finally got into bed. If this was the night they laid eyes on each other, she wanted to look perfect for her soul mate.

As she shifted around, trying to get into a comfortable position, her eyes caught her old diary lying on the bedside table. She stared at it for a moment, knowing it was of no use. She was never able to reach it in time. Anything she remembered when she woke up— _if_ she remembered—was lost to her by the time she grabbed her diary and opened to a blank page. So, she reached over and simply snagged the pen from inside it. She had to be quick, and she would write on her fucking hand if she had to.

 _But I won’t need to_ , she told herself as she slowly drifted off to sleep. _‘Cause this time it’s different. I can feel it._

_Think positive, think positive, think positive…_

“Darcy?”

“Steve,” she breathed, her eyes snapping open only to be clouded by darkness again. “Well, this is disappointing.”

“What is?”

“I still can’t see you.” But that wasn’t what bothered her. She remembered him telling her he was born and raised in Brooklyn. She remembered stories about Bucky, art school, and the scrawny kid who wanted to join the army and didn’t know how to give up. She remembered everything.

The sudden onslaught of memories caused her to stumble and fall on all fours as a leaden weight seemed to settle in the pit of her stomach and her heart sank.

Steve wasn’t from another realm. He was from New York, just a couple thousand miles away from where she was right now, and he was _still_ invisible to her eyes.

A dry sob escaped her as her head fell into the circle of her arms. She had wasted her entire life searching for answers, pondering what was wrong with her soul bond, soaking up theory upon crazy theory on the internet about people who didn’t remember their dreams or didn’t have soul mates at all. She had stupidly believed _for months_ that maybe her soul mate was a man out of this world, like Thor. And yet here she was, back to square one.

If she had only remembered the details of her dreams with Steve, she wouldn’t have washed herself out trying to figure out where _the fuck_ he was located on the Yggdrasil.

All her theorizing and mad research had been for nothing. He was on earth. Probably still in Brooklyn where he was born. So it made no goddamn sense why they couldn’t see each other. Was Steve right after all? Was he dead?

No. _No_. She couldn’t lose hope. Not yet.

“I wish I could touch you.”

Her head shot up at Steve’s whispered declaration.

“I wish I could look into your eyes and tell you how beautiful you are.”

Darcy felt her chin tremble and she sniffed wetly. “You don’t know what I look like, Steve.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said smoothly. “I know your heart. And it’s beautiful.”

If it was anyone else saying these words, Darcy would call them a cheeseball, but coming from Steve, they just made her insides melt.

Making up her mind, she said confidently, “You should think about me.”

“I think about you all the time.”

“No. Think harder. Like, focus on me with all your might.” When Steve didn’t question her weird demands, she plowed on, “I’ll do the same. Maybe we can’t find each other because we aren’t trying. If we focus on each other the best we can, I dunno, _something_ could happen.”

“Darcy…”

She knew what he was going to say and she wasn’t ready to hear it. “No, Steve, please,” she begged. “Just humor me.”

“All right.”

“Okay. Ready, set, go!” Darcy curled herself into a ball and squeezed her eyes tight shut, trying to clear her thoughts of everything except Steve. She couldn’t picture a face but she could hear the echo of his voice even in the furthest recesses of her mind. She could hear the things he had said to her, she could hear his laugh, rich and beautiful, as it washed over her in waves, making her ache for a glimpse of him.

 _Anything_ , she prayed desperately to any deity who was listening. _Show me anything. A finger, a nose… his lips._

_Please please please…_

“Do you see anything?” she called, keeping her eyes closed.

“No,” came his tired response.

“Don’t sound so resigned. Focus properly.”

“Darce…”

“No!” she snapped. “Try harder. You aren’t trying. Why aren’t you trying?” Her voice caught on the last word and Steve sighed.

“Darcy, please,” he implored. “Don’t make this harder than it already is.”

“If you just concentrated—”

“Do you think I want this?” he burst out, effectively shocking her into silence. “Do you think I _like_ being here, trapped in the freezing cold, unable to move a single muscle?” He paused as if waiting for her to contradict him, but she didn’t. “When you leave this place, you wake up in your world, where your family and friends are waiting for you. But I have nowhere else to go, nothing to wake up to except this infinite void that pulls me deeper as each day passes.”

Darcy blinked in confusion, her brain unable to compound this new theory. “Steve, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying why can’t you accept our situation for what it is? _We are not meant to be together_ ,” he said, enunciating each word with unnecessary force. “I told you I’m—”

“Don’t say it,” Darcy shouted angrily. “Don’t you dare say it.”

There was stubborn silence from his side and Darcy thought maybe she had worn him out. But then he sighed, a deep shaky exhale that spoke of broken dreams, lost love, and defeat. When he started speaking, his voice was hollow and robotic, as if he was reciting from a textbook.

“My name is Steven Grant Rogers. I was born to Sarah and Joseph Rogers in the year 1918. When I was twenty-three, I gave myself up for government experimentation. They wanted super soldiers and found a willing guinea pig in me. I wanted to fight in the war, defeat bullies. I wanted to make a difference in the world. So I let myself be turned into a weapon. They gave me a name. They called me… Captain America.”

“What?” Darcy squeaked, eyes going wide at the revelation.

“I’m an artist, an actor, a soldier and a martyr. I buried my Ma when I was twenty. I watched hundreds of people lose their lives in the war. I watched my best friend fall off a train and die.”

 _Bucky_. The name came unbidden to Darcy’s mind. _Bucky Barnes_. She had read about him in school. Steve had told her about him. But she couldn’t handle hearing it again, not like this.

“Stop.”

“I crashed a plane into the Arctic in March of 1945. I was alive when the water flooded in. I was alive when it settled over me and slowly turned to ice.”

“I said stop!”

“I struggled and struggled but couldn’t break the ice. In my last moments, when it became so difficult to hold my breath that I couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t find the energy to fight anymore, in those moments my only wish was for a miracle that never happened.”

“Stop, please,” Darcy sobbed, flattening her palms against her ears like scared little Darcy had done years ago when she first landed in this place.

“I’ve been trapped in this damned void _for years_!” Steve continued mercilessly. “When you came along, I temporarily deluded myself into thinking there was hope for me after all. But I was wrong. I have no idea _how_ you found me, but Darcy, listen to me carefully. You can’t save me. You can’t be with me. I’m dead!”

Her stomach lurched at his words, and the cold, harsh reality of what Steve was saying (what he had been trying to say all along) finally dawned on Darcy. She pressed a hand to her mouth and sobbed harder, the feeling of hopelessness she had fought for so long surging up to the surface and wrapping itself around her aching heart. Steve was dead. Steve was really dead.

She cried until she couldn’t breathe, until her stomach ached from all the heaving and her heart felt like it had stopped beating altogether. Questions upon questions swirled in her mind, each worse than the other. What would happen now? Would she have to live through another clueless year only to come back to this place and find out all over again that her soul mate was dead? What about after _she_ died? If Steve was dead and still able to communicate with her, would she suffer the same fate? Would they both have to go through this torture for the rest of all eternity?

“Oh, God!” she wailed, clutching her head with both hands as if trying to physically contain her riotous thoughts. “This is not happening. You can’t be dead. You can’t be dead…”

“This is why I didn’t tell you the truth about me sooner,” Steve said sadly. “But you aren’t a little girl and I can’t protect you anymore.”

Fresh hot tears slid down her face. She had nothing to say to that, didn’t know if she should be grateful or angry. Her wracking sobs gradually abated to silent weeping and she must have sat there for hours before Steve attempted to talk to her again.

His voice came to her as if from far away. “Come on, Darce. Stop crying.”

“Huh?” Darcy looked up, puzzled. Not only did Steve sound like he was being pulled away from her but she had felt something else too. Something she had never felt in this cold, dead place before.

Her tears subsided as it happened again. There was a shift in the air and the temperature spiked.

“What’s going on?” she mumbled, getting to her feet and squinting into the darkness. “Steve, are you there?”

She looked to her left, then to her right and back left. She was sure she had caught something from the corner of her eye.

There it was again! What was it? It looked like… light.

_Oh. Oh fuck!_

“Steve!” she yelled, making a dash for the tiny point of light. “Steve, where are you?”

“Something’s happening,” he called back, sounding panicked. “What are you doing?”

“I’m not doing anything,” she shouted excitedly. “But I can see light in the distance. Can you see it, too?”

“Yeah, I…” A pause. Then, “Oh, shit.”

“What, what?” she practically screeched as she ran. What the hell was going on?

“I can hear voices. I think… Christ, I think I’m waking up!”

“What?!” Her heart started pounding and she willed her feet to go faster. “How is that possible?”

She caught a flash of blue in the distance, a distinct form of someone standing before the light, and her brain went into overdrive. _Oh God, oh God, oh God_. This was it. She was finally going to lay eyes on her soul mate. It’d be a brief encounter but that hardly mattered. Because she was going to remember him in the morning and he was going to remember her. There were still a couple of things that didn’t make sense. Like, them establishing just moments earlier that Steve had been dead for decades, and now he was… waking up?

If Darcy had time to ponder over this, she’d be going “what the fuck!”

As it stood, she didn’t have time. She needed to see his face before he left the dream world. But even in this world, there was no respite from clumsiness. She tripped spectacularly and fell on her face. Tears immediately sprung to her eyes as she watched the light get brighter and brighter.

“STEVE,” she bellowed one last time, not wanting to give up yet. “LOOK BEHIND YOU!”

He did. She saw him turn—she fucking _saw_ him turn—but that exact moment, as luck would have it, the brightness became nearly blinding and Darcy covered her eyes out of reflex.

She did hear him though and, even as the light faded, his parting words reverberated devastatingly in her mind. “I’ll find you.”

“No, no, no, no, no please. STEVE!” Darcy cried, shooting up in bed. She was wide awake and her eyes were unusually alert.

“I remember,” she whispered in mingled shock and triumph. “Your name is Steve. Steve Rogers.”

She frantically searched for the pen she had been clutching before she fell asleep. She must have dropped it in her sleep. “Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve.”

It was hiding in the folds of the sheet by her knee and Darcy pounced on it. “Steve, Steve, St… what was it? What was it? Oh yeah, Steve.”

She pulled off the cap with enough violence that it flew across the room and hit the far wall. Then, she placed the tip on her left palm and paused. “What was I going to write?” she murmured to herself, frowning deeply. “What was it? Was it his name? Or was it something else equally important?”

She pressed her fist to her forehead in impatience, racking her brain for the last thing she remembered, for the last thing she said after she woke up. “Think, think, think,” she urged herself furiously. Her head pounded and she could feel a scream building. “Did I see him? What did I forget? Was it his name?”

She whipped her gaze to the ceiling. “WAS IT YOUR FUCKING NAME?”

The pen fell from her fingers and she grasped at her hair, pulling at them wildly. She had messed this up again. How could she be so stupid, so forgetful? What the hell had she done to deserve this? Anger, guilt and frustration clawed at her insides and she felt like she was going mad from the weight of her emotions. It was unbearable, the pain, and it was everywhere. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t breathe. The only thing left to do was…

Scream.

———

Looking back, her memory of that day was pretty hazy. She did remember Jane and Erik bursting into her room in a state of panic to find her sitting on the bed, clawing at her face and screaming herself hoarse. She remembered sobbing against Erik’s chest, crushing his fingers with hers as she held onto both him and Jane for dear life.

But nearly two years down the line, Darcy had no idea why she had acted so crazy that day or what had been going on in her mind that was bad enough to make her want to pull her hair out.

“So I forgot his name. Big deal,” she told Jane as they inspected their shiny new lab in Stark Tower. “It’s not as if it’s a new development. I’ve never remembered anything about my dreams.”

“But you did remember,” Jane pointed out, ambling over to the small potted plant sitting on what was going to be her work desk from now on. “Something must have happened in that dream to make you lose your shit like that.”

“But that’s the point,” Darcy argued, plucking the note from the potted plant and reading it out loud.

_Welcome to your new lab, Dr. Foster. I bet it’s a vast improvement from your last junkyard. Bruce’s lab is a floor above yours. Mine is on the 79th. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask._

_\- Tony Stark_

“What a douche. Anyway,” Darcy tossed the note aside and turned to an amused Jane, “Say I did remember something, I also immediately forgot about it. Frustration is understandable. That’s my default setting when it comes to the topic of soul mates. But the way I behaved… wow, I still can’t quite believe I acted so crazy.”

“Yeah, it was pretty wild,” Jane agreed. “You scared us.”

Darcy looked away, an all too familiar feeling of melancholy washing over her as she thought about that fateful day in New Mexico. “It’s just… I can’t help but feel like I’m missing something important,” she murmured, absently fingering the tiny hole in her sleeve. “Not just his name, but something else. Like, I _know_ what it is. I just can’t…”

“Remember?” Jane finished sympathetically, reaching for her hand and squeezing hard.

Darcy sighed morosely. “Yeah.”

She walked around the lab in aimless circles while Jane set her laptop and a few other knickknacks on her desk. “You never did answer my question,” she said chattily. “What about your last birthday dream? Was it any better?”

Darcy scoffed. “I didn’t sleep that night, remember? Erik relapsed and we had to take care of him.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s… I’m sorry,” Jane mumbled, looking ashamed. “You should have told us. It’s not cool to forget birthdays.”

“Pfft. It’s fine. Besides, we forget your birthday all the time.”

Jane waved offhandedly. “I don’t have to look forward to any dream sharing now, do I? I already met my soul mate.” She winked and slapped her tushie. Darcy was proud. “Besides, my days of wearing a tiara and blowing out a pink candle are over.”

“You speak as if you’re seventy years old with one foot in the grave.”

“I might as well be, with you and everyone else intent on pulling my last nerve.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Such melodrama. I’m gonna go take a look around, find out where the good coffee is.”

“You do that.”

Stark Industries’ research division was thriving. Jane’s lab was at the far end, lending them some sort of privacy, but a little further down the corridor, scientists milled around laughing and sharing new research, sipping coffee, bustling around from one lab to another wearing white coats. All that energy, combined with Stark’s sleek technology, made the tower a fascinating place. Darcy couldn’t wait to explore the rest of it.

The tower map in the employee elevator showed the location of the cafeteria seven floors down. So, she pushed herself into the very back and waited patiently as the elevator stopped on nearly every floor, taking and losing employees. Four floors down, it opened on the HR floor and three people filed in.

That’s when she saw him. Tall, blond, dressed in a shade of blue that made something spark in her brain. A long forgotten memory perhaps. She found herself edging towards the doors, needing a closer look.

He was talking to someone, a woman, who was brandishing a file in his face while he stood there looking mutinous. Either by accident or because he felt Darcy’s gaze on him—she didn’t know which—he looked up. Past the numerous faces, across the corridor, and through the closing doors of the elevator, their eyes met.

And time stopped.

A dozen fleeting thoughts (or were they memories?) each stranger than the last, flashed through Darcy’s mind, disappearing before she could even comprehend them. Her brain worked a mile a minute trying to figure out what it was about him that drew her eyes and made her breath hitch. She was fairly certain she didn’t know him. But there was just something about him…

She saw him take a step in her direction before the elevator doors shut fully in her face.

“No,” Darcy whispered, slapping the metal. “No, stop the elevator.”

“It’ll stop two floors down,” someone informed her politely.

“I need to get off now,” Darcy said urgently, fitting the tips of her fingers in the crack between the two doors and trying to force them apart. “Stop the fucking elevator!”

“Ma’am, calm down.”

But for some reason, she couldn’t calm down. She needed to see that man, talk to him, ask him…

Ask him what? She didn’t know. She couldn’t understand her emotions right now. They were all over the place.

She clung desperately to the elevator doors, waiting for them to slide back open, and when they did, she was the first one out, sprinting madly in the direction of the stairwell. She pushed open the swinging door only to find _him_ running down the stairs, leaping over three steps at a time.

He slowed to a stop when he saw her, both of them breathing hard as they stared at each other in bemusement.

Now that he was standing before her, Darcy didn’t know what to say to him. He was essentially a stranger. And he had probably guessed she had run out to find him. Therefore, anything she said to him right now could be construed as a blatant come on, which wouldn’t be her intention at all.

She couldn’t tell what he was thinking but he looked as conflicted as she felt. Her emotions, which had quieted at the sight of him on the stairwell, erupted into chaos again. She was experiencing the weirdest feeling, a strange sort of ache inside her that she couldn’t place. It felt like her heart had swollen several sizes and was causing pain and happiness at the same time.

When he finally spoke to her, her heart all but soared.

“I’m sorry but have we met?” he asked uncertainly.

Darcy sagged with relief. “I thought so, too,” she said with a soft smile, surprised to find her vision grow blurry. She swiped carelessly at her eyes and stepped closer to him. Several questions bubbled up within her, but one in particular had always held the most importance in her life— “What’s your name?”

“Steve,” he replied with a warm smile.

“Nice to meet you, Steve.” She stuck out her hand for him to shake and discovered she didn’t mind when he held onto it a little longer than necessary. “I’m Darcy.”

**Author's Note:**

> This, here, was supposed to be the end. Swift and hopeful. But it felt incomplete and I really didn't wanna let you guys go without a ~~first kiss~~ proper conclusion. So yay for a second chapter!
> 
> I assume people will have questions after reading this part, about this particular soul mate universe. If you do, go crazy in the comment section. If you don't, wow that means I did my job well. Just so you know, the next chapter _will_ answer some pressing questions.


End file.
